This invention relates generally to gaming printers and more specifically to printers for use in cashless gaming machines that produce cash-out paper vouchers or print-on-demand player tracking card/vouchers.
The gaming machine manufacturing industry provides a variety of gaming machines for the amusement of gaming machine players. An exemplary gaming machine is a slot machine. A slot machine is an electromechanical game wherein chance or the skill of a player determines the outcome of the game. Slot machines are usually found in casinos or other more informal gaming establishments.
Gaming machine manufacturers have more recently introduced cashless enabled games to the market and these have begun to find wide acceptance in the gaming industry. Cashless enabled games are so named because they can conduct financial exchanges using a mixture of traditional currencies and vouchers. Typically, a cashless enabled game has a gaming printer to produce vouchers and a bill acceptor that supports automatic reading of vouchers. To coordinate the activities of multiple cashless enabled games, one or more cashless enabled games may be electronically coupled to a cashless enabled game system that controls the cashless operations of a cashless enabled game.
When a player cashes out using a cashless enabled game coupled to a cashless enabled game system, the cashless enabled game signals the system and the system may determine the type of pay out presented to the player. Depending on the size of the pay out, the cashless enabled game system may cause the cashless enabled game to present coins in the traditional method of a slot machine, or the cashless enabled game system may cause a gaming printer in the cashless enabled game to produce a voucher for the value of the pay out. The voucher may then be redeemed in a variety of ways. For example, the voucher may be redeemed for cash at a cashier's cage or used with another cashless enabled game. In order to use the voucher in a cashless enabled game, the voucher is inserted into a bill acceptor of another cashless enabled game at a participating casino and the cashless enabled game system recognizes the voucher, redeems the voucher, and places an appropriate amount of playing credits on the cashless enabled game.
Cashless enabled games have found an increasing acceptance and use in the gaming industry, both with players who enjoy the speed of play and ease of transporting their winnings around the casino and casinos who have realized significant labor savings in the form of reduced coin hopper reloads in the games, and an increase in revenue because of the speed of play. Practical field experience with printers used in cashless enabled games has illustrated that there are areas for improvement in the current printer designs and implementation. These areas in need of improvement include methods and means of detecting paper jam events.
A paper jam can occur for a number of reasons. Various schemes for dealing with paper jams in existence today rely on either containing the voucher until completely printed or declaring a paper jam if the voucher does not reach a sensor in a certain amount of time. One short fall of these schemes is that the printing process normally continues after the paper jam occurs, thus creating a partially printed or otherwise undesirable printed cash out ticket or voucher. Next, the paper jam normally requires an attendant or technician to travel to the gaming machine and physically remove the voucher.
Therefore, a need exists for a paper jam detector that can detect a paper jam easily and quickly within a normal voucher printing event. The paper jam detector should make a decision to stop printing or provide paper jam information to a gaming machine or host for decision making. Various aspects of the present invention meet such a need.